Sunday, October 18, 2015

For
20 years, I've hung onto my old Amiga 2000, in the hopes that one day I'll be
able to set it up and use it again to play all the wonderful games that I still
remember with such fondness. Workbench 1.3 and 3.1, Guru Meditation errors... ah, memories.

However,
it's just not going to happen and I have to face the fact that it's just taking
up space. Even though it's in perfect
working condition, I have to let it go to someone who can make better use of
it. I have quite a collection of games with original boxes as well, enough that
it's going to be a challenge to ship it to whoever manages to snag it on eBay
in the next few weeks or months.

Most of the collection, plus hardware pics and screencaps

I
really don't want to sell it, but to be brutally realistic, I also don't want
to sit around waiting for games to load up on a system whose CPU runs at a
paltry 25mHz. to put that in perspective, my ‘older’ 4-year-old AMD 905e CPU
runs at 3.7 gHz, several hundred times
faster. And that's without factoring in that many of the games run from floppy
disks, or off a first-generation hard disk.

It's
unknown if anybody will purchase the Amiga from me, even if I price it's quite
reasonably, due to the shipping costs. The Amiga itself weighs over 30 pounds
with just a keyboard and mouse, while the 5 boxes of games are about 20 pounds
and several feet in all dimensions for everything. I spent too many hours today taking every single Amiga-related bit of hardware and software out of their boxes, laying them out and photographing them to use in the sale listing next weekend. You can see some( not all )of the pictures compiled above.

Hopefully,
somebody out there will give it a good home; I certainly did.

Oct 13 – Walmart Wages

When
it comes to lifestyle, your job is a critical factor. At least for most people.

If
you're working for minimum wage, there's not a lot of lifestyle to be had in
terms of financial purchase power. I should know: I've worked for minimum wage
too often and for too long in my life and far too recently, I might add.

What
is minimum wage mean for employers, however? One word: profit.

For
most employers, wages make up anywhere from 30 to 40% of their operating costs,
meaning the less they can pay employees, the more margins are available for
profit for the business. The larger the company, the more savings can be had by
maintaining a lean workforce who are paid as close to possible as a minimum for
their industry.

Unsurprisingly
extremely large employers, such as Walmart, stand to save the most money by
paying their employees the least when it comes to wages. While the following
video has been online since the spring of 2015, I haven't seen it before this
week and I find it resonates with me on several levels. I do understand that it
posits several simplifications in the formula that uses, but all the same, it
captures the essence of how profit is king in a modern capitalist society and
the pawns are the workers:

Oct 14 – Battlefront Beauty

Oh,
to have money to spend on a high-end gaming PC!

There's
just one game I want to play right now: Star
Wars Battlefront.

It
is the most gorgeous game, graphics-wise, and those incredible visuals go a
long way towards giving the player the feeling of total immersion in the Star
Wars universe. Have a look at this video from the beta, in which a player
simply strolls around and does his best to capture the wondrous visual eye
candy that can be had inside the confines of this latest entry in the silicon
Star Wars universe:

I
probably won't be able to reformat and upgrade my main PC until early 2016. Even
then, the specs are such for SW: Battlefront that running it at any sort of
decent resolution will be a questionable endeavor. But, I may have to try: to be
able to realize a childhood dream of being in the Battle Of Hoth, well…

How
much is that worth, I ask you?

Oct 15 – At a Book Launch Party!

T’was
a fun night to be an author.

Or
at least, the friend of an author, as I attended Astra Crompton’s launch of her
second book, Legend Of The Quill. I had a small part in its final version, having
given feedback on the last draft for the better part of the last year.

The
launch was held at a local coffee shop, Gorge-Ous Coffee, which caters to
writers in many ways and was the perfect place to hold the event. All told,
about two dozen people were present for the launch, which filled the shop to
the maximum.

Astra
read for selections from her book, in reverse chronological order and you could
have heard a pin drop during each reading, the audience was so attentive. It
was a lovely launch and I hope that she'll gain traction from her sales online
at places like Amazon so that she can continue working on the other dozen-plus books
in her series.

For
myself, I hope to have a NYC launch, or perhaps simultaneous launches in
several dozen cities… who knows what the future will bring? I just have to work
hard to get there!

Oct 16 – Business? Me?

I
took a big step today towards financial independence: I’m setting up a
business.

Today
I had a meeting with my credit union to discuss the feasibility of starting my
own home business, with a small loan to get me going in the next few months.

It
would be a based on the purchase of a Glowforge in the next week, to use for
laser cutting / etching services on a small scale. I would be focusing on
several specific markets locally, with an eye towards expanding into the rest
of the province and eventually across Canada. With any luck and a whole lot of
hard work, I may be even able to reach the point where I will have steady
international sales.

Understandably,
I've been very busy for the last two weeks putting together a comprehensive business plan.
Not having written one before, it was a struggle to stay focused while
presenting relevant data and numbers to support my suggested endeavor.
Nevertheless I think I succeeded in creating a solid plan that presents an excellent
case for making a go at my getting ahead financially.

The
meeting at the credit union went very well, with several of the staff
commenting on how well I had crafted my business plan and an interesting note,
how much of a difference character makes in loan decisions - something I hadn't
known and so I'm grateful I had the character of myself to present to them today.

I'll
be on pins and needles for the next week, while I await their decision. There
is a time constraint involved, in that the initial pre-order( with a substantial discount! )for the
Glowforge ends on October 24, so the timing is a little tight. I'm hopeful that
things will come through before then and that I'll be able to make the first
purchase for my business out of an approved loan.

Wish
me luck!

Oct 17 – Finished Prime

Well,
that didn’t take long…

About
six weeks ago, I started watching Transformers Prime in earnest on Netflix. I'd
dabbled in the series a year ago when I first saw was available on Netflix, but
only recently did the stories really start to resonate with me; the writing on
the show is fantastic, as I've mentioned before and the voice acting is stellar
- I hadn't known that both Ernie Hudson and Markie Post were part of the cast.

Watching
it at home and on my phone( over wifi,
darn data limits… )I continued to be impressed by the show's quality and
depth. Not to mention the gorgeous HD graphics gracing every frame.

Today
I watched the final episode and it did not disappoint! Everything wrapped up
fairly nicely, with an eye towards a possible continuance of the series in
different directions. I do have to say I wasn't sure how they would top
themselves, so to speak, considering the action that has gone on in the plot
lines over the course of the three seasons. It really felt satisfying to end
the series today.

In
viewing Transformers Prime, I was once again reminded of the thousands of hours
of television that I'd like to get around to watching, shows that I have saved
on my computer or listed on Netflix. It's amusing to think that I could spend
several years just watching television while at the moment I don't have cable,
nor do I have the time to indulge such an admittedly luxurious habit.

Maybe
in five or 10 years; I should still have all my saved DVD’s then. Considering
that at last count, my digitize files from my DVD collection were pushing 3 TB
in size, I've had to find some room on multiple drives to fit it all in.

On what media that's all going to be archived on five years hence from now, I have no idea…

Oct 18 – Upgrades

It
worked!

Months
ago, I attempted to install Windows 10 on both my desktop and laptop, with no
success on either. While I understood why the installation on my desktop didn’t
work due to various software issues with Windows, I was perplexed as to why my
laptop failed to upgrade. Several calls to Microsoft tech support didn't
resolve the issue and so I shelved it.

Until today.

On
a whim, I started up the Windows 10 installation program and to my delight, it
got further than it ever had on the previous three attempts, showing me this screen:

After
only a few minutes, with the laptop having rebooted three or four times,
Windows 10 stated that it was installed – huzzah! A little poking around
confirmed that everything was working properly; with the usual driver updates
aside, it looks like my laptop is better than new!

I'll
have to play with Win10 for the next few weeks to see how exactly it's better
than the much-maligned Windows 8.1, which I actually didn't mind all that much
since I didn't use the tiled Metro interface at all. I'm hoping that it will
extend battery life as well as help the system seem speedier with the updated
OS and generally extend the usable lifetime of the laptop, which says it
doesn't have discrete graphics I don't use as a gaming machine so much as a
general-purpose computer.

Definitely
a win today!

This is the earliest blog
post ever, having worked on it starting well before lunch as I've lot more to
do before I go to bed. Oddly, I haven't heard a siren go by all day, which is
really unusual for where I live so I'm really enjoying the relative quiet.
There's been the usual traffic noise, including motorcycles, but for the most
part it's been a relaxing day sitting here doing work on the computer. It's
going to be a busy week up ahead, with three different meetings of my writing
group as well as awaiting news about my business loan application. See you next
week!